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Who you link to says way more about you than the sum total of the links pointing at you. They tell the world what you consider to be important enough to merit a link. That importance might be financial, ethical, relational, preference, reference or deference but they always speak of you as a person.

When a web user does not have a face to associate the links with they become associated with the brand, domain, style, site type or even platform depending on availability, user mindset and past experience. When you sell links you are selling part of your brand and part of you as a public entity so do not be too hasty to cash in on Google's misunderstanding of what a link is. As Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) says on his blog:

"So readers, when they find something distasteful or unreliable, don't just hit the back button once, they hit it twice. They remember not to follow links again through the page which took them there. One's chosen starting page, and a nurtured set of bookmarks, are the entrance points, then, to a selected subweb of information which one is generally inclined to trust and find valuable.
Tim Berners-Lee, Fri, 2006-11-03 10:11, Blogging is great

You may get traffic from the links you get but you are judged by others on the links you give. Give good links and you will soon see the respect that you carry increases but give bad links (or worse no links) and you may never be thought highly of (if at all). So remember when you blog next that the links you give are worth far more than all the links you could ever receive.

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Add your comment. If you give a link it will be a do follow link but if you post one in your comment it will be nofollowed. I'm no fan of keywords as names and will be tempted to yank the link out if irritated. Handles, anon's and keywords in brackets after the name is sometimes okay. For example "Matt (Lord Matt)" is cool. Feel free to disagree respectfully, correct me or just say what you think. Praise is also nice.